Excuse to lose...

 I have to admit that I have always been a movie buff. Maybe through the years wasted a little too much time on them. Clinging to little quotes here or there... But one little nugget changed my life when I was a young man. It was a line from the movie "The Hustler" with Paul Newman. 

"What's the trouble losing when you got a good excuse?"

Once upon a time I had aspirations of being a professional pool player. I spent a lot of time traveling out on the road trying to work my way up the semi-pro ladder onto the pro-tour. I remember I had just got knocked out of a tournament and was doing my usual whining about bad breaks when a friend told me... Man your attitude stinks. And he was right. When I lost it was always...not my fault. It had to be because I had the wrong gear... Or the table was warped... Or this or that.

So I started looking into the philosophy of sports. How to play your best. How to stay in the "zone" so to speak. It was about that time that I came across this old movie. And there it was. A long speech from the antagonist about human psychology. And it rang a bell.

 "What's the trouble losing when you got a good excuse!" 

So simple, yet so full of wisdom. Watch anyone perform. Watch them lose. And then immediately nine times out of ten they will provide you with an excuse, a reason they lost. And to take it a little further, the more I studied the game of pool, the more I realized some guys go into the match with their excuses already planned out. These are the ones I looked for. They already knew they were going to lose. 

So I developed this habit. No excuse was good enough. Nothing. If I lost I owned it. No excuses no matter what. And something funny started happening. I went from being the best in Cartersville to one of the best in Atlanta, And then on to be one of the best in Georgia. With one simple mindset...

"No excuse is good enough to give myself permission to lose."

So back to real life. A new life. But some things I have learned in the past are not useless. And I see people everyday that have their excuses, we all do. But some would rather die clinging to them, than listen to the truth. 

"Well I would go to church but (insert excuse)."

"Well I would get involved in that (but)"

"Well I would help them out (but)"

"Well I would believe.....(but)"

They hang on to that excuse like somehow it will save them. Like somehow they can reason with God on judgement day. In the end, God doesn't want to hear any excuses. He sent His Son to die for you... What excuse can compare to that? There is only one way to win in this game of life. 

Eliminate excuses. Humble yourself and cry out to God. He will draw you to Himself. In this life if you lose it's all on you. But unlike some silly pool game, this game has eternal consequences.